Managing customer support at scale is far from easy. And if you’ve ever tried to call customer support during peak service hours, you know what it can be like on the other side.

Call centers often find themselves inundated with high call volumes while simultaneously being under pressure to minimize staff. This is where a business process outsourcing (BPO) call center—which is an outside company you can partner with to handle your overflow support calls—can be a perfect solution.

By partnering with a BPO, you can experience many key benefits that streamline your customer service operations.

13 Tasks and Activities You Can Offload to a Call Center BPO

Outsourcing your call center operations can provide your team with numerous benefits, ranging from reduced overhead, smoother support operations, and a more consistent brand experience. Depending on your specific business, some benefits may have more impact than others.

In any case, you can expect a BPO to help your call center do the following:

1. Handle Repetitive Inbound Calls

Offloading routine inquiries like account questions, order status calls, and general FAQs can save your customer support team countless hours per week. BPO staff can handle repetitive, low-complexity calls so your agents can prioritize more complex customer issues or larger accounts that require a more white-glove approach.

2. Provide Overflow Call Support

During peak call periods, BPOs prevent long wait times and abandoned calls by managing spillover volumes of incoming customer support calls. This makes it easier for customers to get quick answers without needing to deal with long wait times over the phone.

3. Drive Outbound Calling Campaigns

Many call centers can also perform outbound services like cold calling for lead generation. Through BPO, your call center agents can regularly perform tedious outbound calls like customer surveys, lead follow-ups, and renewal reminders.

By removing these predictable, structured calling tasks from your in-house team, your top sales and customer success talent can stay focused on managing complex deals that are already in your pipeline.

4. Monitor Chats, Emails, and Social Media

In addition to phone support, BPOs can handle various digital channels like chat, email, SMS/text, and social media inquiries. These activities often require 24/7 monitoring and quick response times that your core staff may have difficulty providing at scale—especially if your business operates across multiple regions and time zones.

5. Fill Staffing Gaps Without Hiring

Rather than hiring and training more full-time agents to meet rising call volumes, having a BPO partner allows you to service incoming calls without increasing your company headcount. This ability to scale up and down according to demand can lead to huge savings on recruitment and HR costs.

6. Provide Multi-Language Support

BPOs with multilingual capabilities can serve international customers in their native languages. Not only does this make it easier to provide customer service outside of the country you’re operating in, but it also helps overcome the potential cultural barriers that may present themselves on your customer service calls.

7. Serve Overnight and Weekend Shifts

If your call center only operates during standard or limited business hours on weekdays, your BPO staff can offer 24/7/365 support. This makes it easier for customers to get assistance whenever they call rather than having to wait until core business hours.

8. Offer Specialized Expertise

Some BPOs have expertise serving specific industries like healthcare, financial services, and ecommerce—just to name a few.

By outsourcing industry-specific calls, your customers can quickly receive knowledgeable support from representatives with relevant industry knowledge. Not only does this make it easier to provide support at scale, but it also can help save time onboarding and training new FTEs who may not be familiar with your industry’s slang and terminology.

9. Improve First Contact Resolution

With specialized processes for different routine issues, BPO reps can often resolve inquiries upon first contact with your customers rather than escalating the issue or transferring them elsewhere. By utilizing a BPO with pre-built processes and call scripts that are specific to your industry, you can condense your average handle times and improve both agent productivity and customer satisfaction.

10. Offer Quality Assurance Reviews

Reputable BPOs record calls for periodic quality assurance checks based on criteria you define, like compliance, accuracy, tone, and more. This oversight ensures that your call center is delivering a consistent brand experience across your customer base.

11. Provide Real-Time Reporting and Analytics

Many reputable BPOs also give you access to reporting dashboards that track call center success metrics like handle times, wait times, first contact resolution, CSAT/NPS scores, and more. This insight can help your in-house teams diagnose issues within your call center and optimize your support operations.

12. Reduce the Total Cost of Your Support Operations

When you factor in the costs associated with employee recruitment, training, salary, benefits, retention, and management overhead, outsourcing costs less per agent than in-house staffing. Additionally, BPOs give you the option to scale your support operations up and down as needed, which can save your company money and resources that otherwise would’ve been spent on unnecessary overhead costs.

Signs it’s (Past) Time to Hire a BPO

In some cases, you may be way overdue in finding an outsourced customer service partner. If any of the following situations apply to your call center, you should either increase the headcount of your in-house support team fairly quickly—or partner up with a call center BPO.

Caller Wait Times Exceed 30-60 Seconds

Customers expect fast service when calling for support. If your team is struggling to meet a 30-second benchmark for providing service consistently, outsourcing some of your incoming call volumes can help. Not only does this ease the workload of your in-house support teams, but it also will lead to increased customer satisfaction scores and a more efficient support process overall.

Your Agent Occupancy is Above 80%

High inbound call volumes often keep agents busy almost all of the time. While this may look like a good sign that your call center is being utilized effectively, it may be a bit precarious.

For example, if your occupancy rates exceed 80%, it can lead to hurried, ineffective support calls that don’t actually help your customers. By adding a BPO partner, however, your team will have the support and breathing room necessary to have more focused and meaningful customer conversations.

Your Staffing is Short of Forecasted Volumes

By utilizing forecasting models to predict call volumes for your call center, you can more accurately set your staffing needs for an upcoming year or quarter. However, in an outlier case where your actual call levels consistently outpace your forecasts, outsourcing to a BPO partner makes it easier to handle the surplus. This prevents understaffing quality issues like long customer wait times and hasty service from overburdened, burnt-out agents.

Your Sales Team is Handling Customer Support

Inbound call spikes can sometimes lead to departments like sales pitching in for support—especially in early-stage companies where traditional job descriptions are not as well defined. While your intentions may be good, utilizing your sales team for customer support diverts your revenue-driving employees from focusing on the deals that are needed to scale your business.

Your Repeat Call Rate is Spiking Upwards

When your first-contact resolution rates decline, your call center is bound to get repeat calls from customers who weren’t able to get their support requests resolved. Not only does this inflate your call volume, but it also leaves customers frustrated as they try to re-explain their issues. However, by working with a call center BPO, you can build out a dedicated team to resolve common customer complaints and lower your repeat call rates.

The Benefits and Potential Drawbacks of Hiring a BPO

Despite how the main benefits of adding BPO capacity to your call center include increased flexibility, reduced costs, and the ability to deliver more responsive customer service, it can also come with some risks around control, quality, and brand integrity that you should consider before partnering with an outsourced team.

For starters, some of the extra bits of work you’ll need to do with a BPO partner include establishing clear success metrics and processes, as well as close monitoring to help mitigate any potential risks associated with outsourcing your customer support.

Additionally, you’ll need to take into account that there is some ramp-up time until your BPO extension is trained on your offerings, systems, and brand voice. There can also be some culture clashes that occur from blending and integrating your in-house and outsourced support teams.

Ultimately, the decision to outsource depends on your budget, growth plans, how quickly you need extra support, and how well you can handle less control in return for more flexibility.

How to Choose the Right Call Center BPO for You

Once you’ve weighed the pros and cons of working with a call center BPO, you still need to find the right provider for you and your business. Be sure to take adequate measures to vet your outsourced partners and uphold a high-quality standard of customer service for your customers.

Define Your Support Objectives and Requirements

Before you begin looking for an outsourced partner, you should document your current call types, volumes, service level targets, and forecasted growth. Once you’ve done an in-house audit of your support team, you can then outline what types of support tasks you want to outsource, along with any specialized expertise needed from the BPO—like additional foreign languages and technical skills.

Request a Proposal

With your goals and metrics established, you can then get started on creating and distributing a request for proposal (RFP). While vetting your potential BPO partners, be sure to ask questions about security, quality management, and scalability.

Review Case Studies Serving Similar Clients

Once you’ve come up with a list of the best call center services for your company, ask your potential partners for case studies showcasing their past successes in assisting other clients like you. You can also ask to review any metrics proving that they delivered results for similar organizations in your vertical at a comparable scale.

Conduct Reference Checks on Short List

Once you’ve nailed down 2-3 options, do reference checks asking about the service delivery and security of your potential parents. Speaking with current clients is a great way to ensure that your BPO partner is vetted and trusted by other companies in your industry.

What to Expect When Working with a BPO

While building an effective working relationship with an outsourced partner requires tight collaboration, strong BPOs will handle much of the heavy lifting after being contracted.

You should expect there to be a service level agreement SLA that ensures prompt call answering, quality assurance through recorded evaluations, and real-time visibility into your call center’s performance through online dashboards. In terms of overhead, pricing typically varies based on call volumes, hours covered, and service levels—but $25-$60 per agent hour is typical.

You should also plan to meet on a monthly or quarterly basis (or both) to review metrics, discuss process changes, and get aligned on optimization tactics to maximize value over your long-term partnership. By setting expectations from the beginning, you’ll be well on your way to outsourcing and improving your customer service operations.